d crisis of danger, weakness at
home, and calamity abroad, terrified and insulted by the neighboring
powers, unable to act in America, or acting only to be destroyed, where
is the man with the forehead to promise or hope for success in such a
situation, or from perseverance in the measures that have driven us to
it? Who has the forehead to do so? Where is that man? I should be glad
to see his face.

You cannot _conciliate_ America by your present measures. You cannot
_subdue_ her by your present or by any measures. What, then, can you do?
You cannot conquer; you cannot gain; but you can _address_; you can lull
the fears and anxieties of the moment into an ignorance of the danger
that should produce them. But, my Lords, the time demands the language
of truth. We must not now apply the flattering unction of servile
compliance or blind complaisance. In a just and necessary war, to
maintain the rights or honor of my country, I would strip the shirt from
my back to support it. But in such a war as this, unjust in its
principle, impracticable in its means, and ruinous in its consequences,
I would not contribute a single effort nor a single shilling. I do not
call for vengeance on the heads of those who have been guilty; I only
recommend to them to make their retreat. Let them walk off; and let them
make haste, or they may be assured that speedy and condign punishment
will overtake them.

My Lords, I have submitted to you, with the freedom and truth which I
think my duty, my sentiments on your present awful situation. I have
laid before you the ruin of your power, the disgrace of your reputation,
the pollution of your discipline, the contamination of your morals, the
complication of calamities, foreign and domestic, that overwhelm your
sinking country. Your dearest interests, your own liberties, the
Constitution itself totters to the foundation. All this disgraceful
danger, this multitude of misery, is the monstrous offspring of this
unnatural war. We have been deceived and deluded too long. Let us now
stop short. This is the crisis--the only crisis of time and situation,
to give us a possibility of escape from the fatal effects of our
delusions. But if, in an obstinate and infatuated perseverance in folly,
we slavishly echo the peremptory words this day presented to us, nothing
can save this devoted country from complete and final ruin. We madly
rush into multiplied miseries, and "confusion worse confounded."

Is it possib